In this chapter, Robert Lawlor explores the early observations on light of the great Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who lived 570 – c. 495 BC. Pythagoras, famous today for the Pythagorean Theorem, was a very influential philosopher and mathematician. This is a fascinating journey through thinking that influenced the last 2,500 years of western thought about what light is.

“The Pythagorean symbolists assumed what may seem an obvious cosmological ground for their numerical procedures: that God has manifested himself in this universe as light…Certainly spiritual texts from many cultures abound with the association between light and the universal creator. But Pythagoreanism, like its Egyptian sources, is an instance in which this association may be taken not only as an inspired metaphor, but also as a protocol-scientific analogy. Leibnitz beautifully restated this Pythagorean time, saying, ‘The exquisitely orderly behavior of light indicates the underlying radical patterned order of reality'” (p187).

“Light and other forms of radiation can only be absorbed if they carry precisely the right amount of energy to promote an atom from one rung to a higher rung. As the atom falls back to its fundamental state the absorbed radiation must be removed, carrying away the difference between the two levels. This released energy appears as a photon or a quantum of light having a particular wave-length determined by the energy difference in the rise and fall within the structure of the atom…[This] occurs according to a very precise rhythmic scale. Every atom possesses a preset harmonic energy scale, ‘a musical organization’: an in-formed vibratory gradation” (p201).

“Substance and light are of the same electromagnetic energy; they are fields of force whose movement/form is detectable as wave phenomenon. Substance varies from radiated light in that it has been organized into relatively stable geometric vortices by the three primary principles of organization, the protonic, the neutronic and the electronic: the movement towards centrality, centrality and the movement away from centrality. The varying proportions of these three powers determine the geometry of the substance” (p203).

“The logic of Pythagoras is the logic of light and vibration. It is inclusive of the concept of an octave contained within an octave; but it also understands that the essential form-nature of an octave (the consonance of its proportions) is connected to all other octaves through resonance” (p204). “For the Pythagorean, this universe is a universe of perception. Perception is the transformation of light into forms of itself. And light is consciousness imaging itself” (p 205).

The development of a perspective that still penetrates much of our current understanding of the experience of light.

Working at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Arcand and Watzke specialize in communicating science to the public. In their book Light: The Visible Spectrum and Beyond, Arcand and Watzke provide an enlightening story about what light is, way beyond the light we can see with our eyes, and how humanity has discovered and worked with light’s many properties. Light illuminates this understanding with many beautiful pictures of the microscopic to the macroscopic.

“For many people, ‘light’ refers to what we as humans can detect with our eyes. However, as we’ll discuss, this is merely one small slice of the whole range of light that exists. That’s because light, including the human-detectable kind called visible light, is simply a form of energy. The light we see with our eyes is a tiny fraction of the available light in the Universe…There are other types of light with less energy than visible light, and there are forms of light with much more energy” (Light, 10). “All forms of light are energy, and the term scientists have come up with for this energy is ‘electromagnetic radiation’” (Light, 12).

When you are ready to dive deep into a multi-cultural, multi-millennia, aperspectival exploration of the three levels of perceived reality, as described in ecosynomic terms as possibility, development, outcomes or light, verb, and noun, I invite you to plunge yourself into the world of Jean Gebser. A philosopher who lived from 1905 to 1973 in Europe, in this book Gebser provides a very rich developmental picture of human consciousness. This book is so dense with images, examples, etymologies, and explorations of what it means to be human and the evolution of human awareness that I was rarely able to read more than 2-3 pages in a sitting. This is probably one of the five most dog-eared and underlined books I have: a reference book that I will have to come back to for many years to come. Too much to ingest the first time around.

While there are many layers of Gebser’s exploration, I will share here glimpses of his descriptions of the human experience of the three levels of perceived reality in ecosynomics. This is like the 30-second movie trailer that I hope will excite you to see the full 2-hour movie. It is worth the effort.

In brief, as my colleagues and I have surveyed people in 94 countries and met with them in a dozen countries over the past decade, we find that people describe their experiences through three different levels of perceived reality. There is the outcome level of material things, the nouns. There is the development level of building capacities and relationships, of connecting systems, over time, the verbs. And, there is the possibility level of potential, of brilliance that is yet to manifest, the light. In this book, Gebser describes each of these levels in great detail, with examples across many cultures and millennia. I share a sample of these observations.

Vibrancy is a choice. “Diaphaneity..is..to render transparent our own origin, our entire human past, as well as the present, which already contains the future” (6-7). The task is to render transparent what is already here, and not yet visible. This is the purpose of the Agreements Evidence Maps, to see (render transparent) the underlying agreements that shape our experience and outcomes.“It transforms space-timelessness into space-time-freedoms, permitting the mutation from an unconscious openness to a conscious openness, whose essence is not ‘being in’ or ‘being in opposition to’ but diaphaneity” (436).

Outcome (noun) level of reality. “This point-like unity…In the spaceless and timeless world, this constitutes a working unity which operates without a causal nexus…Only in a spaceless, timeless world is the point-related unity a working reality…Because of this spaceless-timeless unity, every ‘point’ (a thing, event, or action) can be interchanged with another ‘point,’ independently of time and place..and of any rational causal connection….Nevertheless, precisely this fact clearly reveals the contradiction in the unity concept, namely, the unconscious discrepancy between the parts (i.e., the points) and the actual unity. Here man, or a human group, is the protagonist, even though this is extremely well concealed. Although man fits in and merges with the event, this very merger and fusion give the event a definite direction” (48-49).

Development (verb) level of reality. “‘Structure’ is understood as an expression of the potential, the possible. As Triptych points out, ‘Structures determine not merely the singular realization, as do formations, but various possibilities of any realization. Today we are interested precisely in the possible, the virtually [and potentially] present, and not merely in the temporally-bound, signal event’… The concept of structure..receives..the qualitative emphasis for sociology which allows space-time-free origin to shine through the qualitative potentiality” (429).

Possibility (light) level of reality. “‘Possibility’ is a potency or a latent intensity, and therefore a quality…a qualitative character in contrast to the spatial emphasis, measurability, and basically quantitative aspects of three-dimensionality…(like) the ultimate consequences of the nature of the electron–one of the elementary particles which are the building blocks of our world and of the universe–indicate that it is without substance. This means that it is a transparent structure…This de-substantialization ultimately changes the non-visual nature of even the ‘material’ realm into transparency or diaphaneity” (378).

As Gebser describes in great detail, the point is to acknowledge and transcend the apparent boundaries amongst the three levels of perceived reality, what I have referred to as the grounded potential path — “‘The hidden or the possible of the future’ is valued as present in the supersession of the ‘mere now,’ the qualitative moment” (429).

While it is a difficult read, like carefully laying the foundation for your home, it is well worth the effort on which you can build an aperspectival reality.

Or are the possibilities to which we dedicate most of our creative efforts more real? Think about the time and energy that goes into building the house you designed, way before you ever lived in the house. Are the possibilities that we develop over time, into something we can touch, more real?

Only the Things Level. What happens when people experience money only at the things-matter level? “Material purchases offer clear, concrete benefits, explaining their appeal. We can see them in front of us and hold them in our hands” (Dunn & Norton, 2013, p. 22). And the value we experience, in terms of increased happiness, fades quickly with material purchases. In many cases, we derive more happiness from the anticipation of the purchase than the actual purchase. “Why do we fail to recognize that consuming later can enhance enjoyment? Research shows that when something nice is available immediately, the “power of now” dwarfs all else” (Dunn & Norton, 2013, p. 90). “It’s difficult to overcome the power of now, but it’s possible to harness this force” (Dunn & Norton, 2013, pp. 102-103).

Both the Development and Things Levels. What happens in experiential purchases (over time) versus material-transaction purchases, when both the development and things levels of reality are perceived? “Research shows that satisfaction with experiential purchases tends to increase with the passage of time, while satisfaction with material purchases tends to decrease” (Dunn & Norton, 2013, pp. 23-24). “Because the benefits of experiences are often more abstract than the benefits of material goods, it’s easier to appreciate the value of experiential purchases with the psychological distance that time provides” (Dunn & Norton, 2013, p. 23).

The authors suggest five principles of happy money, making choices about how we spend money on experiences we have in all three levels of perceived reality (possibility, development, things), and not just the things level. They provide the research that shows these five principles will increase the happiness we derive from the use of our money. I highly recommend Happy Money as a very accessible journey through the research that shows how to get the most value of one’s experiences around money.

To the verb-noun innovations we saw in earlier posts, the possibility-light level adds an additional dimension of potentiality, opening up even greater choice, freedom, and flexibility for responding to the conditions and demands life presents. Said another way, if what is possible is not visible, and if there is no sense of how capacities and relationships can develop over time – that is, if one is stuck in a noun-things perspective, or even a verb-development perspective – then the options for how one responds are limited. The innovations I will now share illustrate how some groups and individuals are able to hold all three perspectives together and what they can accomplish by operating at all three levels as part of their work.

Groups that operate at all three levels take a distinctive approach when looking through the four lenses. They think first about what they would like to achieve. Then they consider what resources would support them in achieving that objective and how to develop those resources over time, so that they can have what they need when they need it. In organizing human interaction, these groups look for, recognize and invite in the potential they see in the people they work with and in their relationships. They choose the capacities and relationships to be developed over time and in this way are able to bring out the best at any given moment. Finally, they think about value in terms of their vision of what is possible, including the benefits to be enjoyed by both the people within the group and those who interact with it as the result of the development of their capacities and relationships.

This three-level approach both envisions abundance and takes the steps needed to bring it into reality. In addition, it avoids the “costs of scarcity” experienced at the things-noun and development-verb levels that are not experienced when simultaneously engaging all three levels together. I will share some examples I have found in the next posts.

I suggested in earlier posts that anything that you manifest, that you make real, has gone through a light-verb-noun process. Like I did with resources and value, we now want to see if you get to a different understanding of what you have learned about organizing, if you start from the light versus starting from the noun. As I showed before, if you start from the light, you start with abundance and choose for what is manifested here and how. If you start from the noun, you end up walled into starting with an assumption of scarcity, which will not allow you to get very far. Now I will develop that understanding step by step.

Starting with the possibility-light level of organizing, from the level of infinite abundance, the why question focuses on choosing the highest level of harmonic vibrancy available. You saw in the earlier chapters that people seek greater harmonic vibrancy. When it is greater around you, you feel better. You feel greater abundance in all dimensions of your experience. And, when there is less harmonic vibrancy around you, you feel worse. You experience greater scarcity. The data that I will share in Part 3 shows that many groups around the world are finding sustainable ways to live out of greater harmonic vibrancy. The secret they are finding is to make the harmonic vibrancy the why of their work. And they find that, along the way, they are able to experience greater abundance in all factors of their life. They say that they listen for the harmonic vibrancy, and the how and the what become relatively straightforward. This is the same experience musicians share.

The how of organizing at the light level makes explicit the potential available to the individuals and the group in their interactions, strengthening the harmonic vibrancy experienced in each relationship (self, other, group, nature, spirit). You use a term for this in your daily life, collaboration. Collaboration is working in relationship to a greater why.

The what of light-level organizing is a set of incentives and structures that simultaneously address the group and individual perspectives of outcome/motivation and function/task. The “inspirited” organization focuses on the growth of the harmonic vibrancy common to the group, as people experience it in the different relationships. This seemingly simple focus wallops a huge punch. It builds in structures of growth, stability, and health for all five relationships (self, other, group, nature, spirit) with everyone that engages with the group. These are critical processes defining the systems of political economy today that determine the organizing forms you use.[1]

There are significant costs to not organizing at the light level. The lack of focus on harmonic vibrancy makes it harder to find those people most attracted to and able to contribute to the higher light in harmonic vibrancy. This translates into the inability to attract high potential people to the group. The best people attract the best relationships, so without them it is hard to attract high potential relationships. Without the possibility-light-level of organizing, there is little time, energy, and space for emerging possibilities – people are too busy getting the work of today done. This makes it difficult to find deeply inspiring innovations. Even though the opportunities for constant and deep learning are always present, they are impossible to see without a focus on the light level. Without high potential people, relationships, and innovations, it is hard to maintain immanence and thus sustainability becomes ever more difficult. Another huge cost from not organizing at the light level is the misalignment of people’s motivations and the group’s organizing principle. As I just suggested, the inspirited organization focuses on the growth of the harmonic vibrancy common to the group, as people experience it in the five primary relationships. Without the possibility-light level of organizing, the inspirited organization becomes focused on specific processes and charters that cause many of the maladies you experience every day. The next post, on the development-verb level of organizing, explores this. These represent a very significant cost for most groups; costs which are easily avoidable and which many groups have figured out how to avoid. They avoid these costs, not by working on minimizing them, rather by designing them out from the onset – the possibility-light level of organizing.

[1] Historian of economic thought Alessandro Roncaglia documents that, “Let us recall that ‘political economy’ is the term by which economic science was commonly designated, until Marshall shifted to the now dominant term ‘economics’; in contemporary economic literature, the term ‘political economy’ has been revived by those streams of research (such as the Marxists, the post-Keynesians, the Sraffians or neo-Ricardians) which lay stress on the social nature of economic activity” (Roncaglia, 2006, p. 53). He is referring to Alfred Marshall (1842-1924), the very influential economics professor at University of Cambridge.

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Now I will apply the three big value questions, which I discussed in the last three posts, to the five relationships at the levels of perceived reality. The figure below captures this.

In this post, I will start with the possibility-light level of reality of value. You experience value in everything you do. It is everywhere around you. It is what drawls your attention. It is the light that makes you smile, as it shows up in everything important to you. It is what you see behind the physical and flowing state of everything with which you engage. It is the possibility you see in each experience you choose. From this perspective, you seek to maximize the possibility-light you experience. You see the potential for this in the possibilities you face.

Value of exchange

If you seek to maximize this experience in your life, then you assess the value of the light you experience by how much it fills you. As you have seen from the beginning chapter of this book, you know when you experience greater or lesser amounts of harmonic vibrancy in your life, and you want greater harmonic vibrancy. At the possibility-light level, this is akin to your reason for existence, so asking the value of this exchange for you is odd. Nonetheless, you know what you are ready to do and how important it is for you to experience this greater harmonic vibrancy.

You experience light-value in each of the primary relationships. It is the gifts you see in your self, the possibilities that fill you. It is the gifts you see in me, and who I can be. You see it in who we can be, what we could achieve, the vibrancy we could experience through our contributions into the world. It is presence of the majestic river and the life-energy you experience in the mountains and in being alive. It is the experience of the infinite creativity and love in spirit.

Mode of exchange

At the light level, you exchange value through the mode of invitation. An invitation is a curious phenomenon you experience daily. An invitation requires intending to do something together with others, seeing another to engage with for that invitation, stepping towards that person and sharing that intention, and finally inviting them to participate. You have to see the we, the other, and step towards the other to bring them into the we. This is an invitation. It engages cognition, relation, and volition. Powerful stuff. This is very different than wondering why nobody showed up for something you thought would be useful. Why didn’t “they” do that? To invite, to be invitational, you must start with yourself, see us in the future, and engage me.[1]

Distribution of value in exchange

Who gets what part of the value generated at the light level of value? This question brings up the subsidiary questions of what is value and what does it mean to distribute infinite abundance? You have already seen, from your own experience, that what you most value, at the light level, is always available everywhere at all time. It is a matter, often a very difficult one, of seeing it. Distributing that is then more a question of who chooses to see it, and less a question of who gets what was seen by someone else. This is the realm most often experienced by those people that you think of as creative or lucky. You give creative people license to live in the infinite possibility, as long as they share some of the fruits of that experience with us. What they share from that experience opens up portals of experience for us, seeing beauty in things we seldom imagined. It is a beautiful painting, a smile, an act of kindness, a party, a dinner, a musical moment, a belly-splitting joke – something pulled from a place of great beauty that we get to experience here. The distributive question of who gets what part of the value generated, in this experience, suggests that it goes to all who participate to the degree of their participation. The creative person experienced the most value, because through their volition they stepped into the infinite and played there. The observer experiences value because of the portal they perceive through the creative act. This is a direct experience of the light level of value, where who gets what is a matter of being, of who is being the light. Interestingly, people who have this light experience of value more frequently tend to be called lucky. They sure are lucky to get to have that experience. Maybe when I retire, I too will be that lucky. What we don’t see, when we call them lucky, is that we all have access to that, if we only choose.

Jumping ahead a little to give you the punch line, you can see why you experience the most value when you start from the light level and work your way through its transformation into verbs and nouns. The distributive possibility in working at the light level of value is to experience the value at all three levels of perceived reality – light, verb, and noun. This cannot be done if one starts from the noun level, as I will soon show you. Starting from the light level, you experience the infinite possibilities and the power in being in relationship with what most fills you. You can then choose to be in relationship with the development of specific dimensions of this infinite, experiencing the abundance in working with its development over time in many relationships. This is also a direct experience of value, at the verb level. Finally, you can choose the moment of overlapping verbs, to choose the noun level moment in space-time where the need is satisfied in an exchange. You also perceive value in that exchange. Thus, the point is that the value to distribute is much greater when you both recognize all three levels of value (light, verb, noun), and when you start from abundance instead of from scarcity.

The distributive question brings us to a moment of formal description of what is happening at the light level of value. You have an experience of something that begins to fill you as you experience its greater possibility. This simple description contains a formulation. The something you experience changes. It increases from one level (X1) to another (X2). The difference you experience is the change in that something (dX). The change you perceive happens through development over a period of time, from one time (t1) to another (t2). The time elapsed between the two is the time to develop, in relationship, the new something you saw (dt). In this development is all the possibility that you saw still living in what you saw (dp). This leads to the formalization of the value experienced at the light level as:

Value(light) = dX/dt/dp

This formulation shows that whoever brings in more possibility at the light level, more development and relationship at the verb level, and more need-satisfaction at the noun level perceives more value. This puts a premium, at the light level, in seeing the value, being the value, doing the value, and having the value – wealth comes from all four at the same time. This is completely different than wealth coming from who has the most.

The possibility-light level also shows why the maxim of the one who gives the most, receives the most. This maxim refers to the giving of the experience of the light value, in three different ways. First, to give of the light value, you have to be in the light value. You have to be the creative person we just described, who lives in the space of the value potential. Living in the relationship to the light level of value is where you receive great value. Opening that experience to others, by giving more fully, opens you to that experience. Second, you receive more fully by experiencing how the creative light manifests in others, those moments of creativity and possibility that so fill you. The third way referred to by this maxim is more indirect. As you open yourself to giving more fully, by our own relationship to the light level of value, you begin to experience it more fully everywhere. Thus, giving more fully opens up three doors to value, through you own direct experience in the giving, through the direct experience in the other, and through the broader experience everywhere around you.

[1]Orland Bishop describes money from this perspective. “All modes of exchange have to have intention for them to work, with an agreement between two or more people to be useful. The mode of exchange is the process of agreement that allows us to utilize this particular thing imbued with the substance of intention. It begins with the human capacity to give intention. From that intention sparks a reality that allows something else to come back” (Teague, 2010). This description makes explicit the manifestation of: light as will – the intention; light as relationship – the agreement; and light as thought – speaking the agreement

To move from the light level of possibility to the verb level of probability, you filter out possibility. This is the same as saying, now it is real. It has a life. It is in a process of maturation, of development.[1] The process is one you experience all of the time. You can see a possibility, a potential. You can agree on it. You can give it your attention, making it explicit. It becomes real, and you can step towards it.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.[2]

You know this happens when you experience the moment of transition from possibility to probability, when it becomes real, when you can actually see it with others, often way before it has a tangible form. For example, when you throw around ideas of where to go eat with friends, these are possibilities. At some point in the exploration, everyone all of a sudden seems to converge on a shared seeing, when they all see the same thing and agree. It becomes real. Long before they are actually sitting in the restaurant together, they begin to move resources to get there. In a way, they can all see themselves there already.

[1] For the technically comfortable, we will “filter out” possibility by integrating the possible life process (dX/dt)/dp over possibility (p). This means that we will have a “snap shot” in possibility of a flow over time.

[2] This quote is the from the play Back to Methusaleh by George Bernard Shaw, where the snake is interacting with Eve in Part I, Act I (Bernard Shaw, 1974, p. 70).

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Looking through the lens of “how much,” I see the available resources, at all three levels of perceived reality. At the possibility-light level, I am aware that what exists depends on what I give my attention to. A simple example helps here. If you have ever thought about going camping, throwing a party, designing a home, or going on vacation, you have experienced light-level resources. Way before the end showed up – the campfire, the party, the home, the vacation – you started to invoke a lot of energy, in the form of intentions, wishes, hopes, fears, thoughts, and work, bringing together many people to work towards something in the future, a possibility they all began to see together. A home becomes real when you and the architect can actually see it together. From that moment on, lots of money, time, work, and materials come together, months before there is an actual house to sleep in. That the house is not completed does not make it any less real.

Starting with the light, you interface with the world through five primary relationships: your own self, the other, the group, nature, and spirit. As described earlier, from your own experience, you know that these are the primary ways in which you experience the harmonic vibrancy of life, the light as it manifests in this world.

Through these five relationships, you give your intention and attention to what shows up in the world as resources. In light you experience your self stepping more deeply into your potential, your deeper gifts and calling. It is what you see in your self and decide for that determines what begins to show up for you in your life. If you decide to be an engineer, life starts to show up very differently than if you see yourself as a carpenter or a salesperson. This also works in very short time frames. What you believe about yourself, in this moment, heavily influences what you can see, in this moment. This is very well documented. What you give your intention to and what you pay attention to begins to show up in your life, for you. The first step in this process is seeing the potential. You can see that you are a caring person and believe that. You can see yourself as an engineer and believe that. When you see it, it resonates deeply within you. Somehow, you just know.

In light you experience the same deeper stepping in me, into my deeper gifts and potential. You can see my gifts, who I can be. It just seems obvious to you, when looking at me, that my light would shine brightly in that way. For example, you just know I would look great in those clothes, that I would really like meeting this person, and that I would be great at this job. How do you know this about me? While we might not know the “how,” I am clear, by asking hundreds of people in lots of countries, that we also “just know it.” You can see it in others. What is amazing about this capacity is that it is not based on past experience with that person. It is not that you know I would like them because I already like them. Nor that I would be great in a job that I have never done. You do not actually “know” this – at least not from past experience. And yet, somehow you have a strong intuition that I will, and you am often right.

In light you experience the unique contribution of each person’s voice to the emergent harmony of the group, and the group’s nurturing of those unique contributions. You can see the possibility for a group harmonic, way before the harmonic resulting from the group’s work together ever appears. You can see the home, and who will help build, months before you can sit in it. You can imagine a quintet, and what it will sound like, weeks before the group even comes together. You can envision a family gathering at the beach for a week, a year before they get together. You do this all the time, seeing the group interacting, even though the group has never been together before.

In light you experience nature through the process of manifesting the infinite possibility of light into the human realm of reality. You live the continuous process of bringing light into verb into noun. You see the mowed lawn, and create that by mowing the lawn. You see the experience of the torte, and go to the store to make it happen. You constantly “see” something, and then manifest it through your attention and your action.

In light you experience the source of creativity – possibility-light – in everything, everywhere about you. When you look around, you see that acts of creation happening everywhere, in all things at all times. Sun is shining. Trees are growing. Your kids are creating music together.

This is the light realm of your experience with resources, as seen through the five primary relationships you have with light. In ecosynomic terms, it is through these five relationships that you transform the infinite potential in light energy into something you use to support your life, your resources. When you give your attention to seeing these possibilities, you are able to see new opportunities. You can see how what is needed is shifting, so that can change what you do before your current work becomes obsolete. You can see the potential consequences of your future actions, and avoid unintended consequences from the outset. When you do this, you avoid the costs of scarcity at the light level.